When we think of Katherine Swynford as a mother, it is almost inevitably the Beaufort children who come to mind. John, Henry, Joan and Thomas Beaufort were the children of Katherine’s long relationship with John of Gaunt, and their later legitimisation gave them an extraordinary place in English history. Through Joan Beaufort came the Nevilles and, eventually, the Yorkist kings; through John Beaufort came Margaret Beaufort and Henry VII. Katherine’s descendants would sit upon the thrones of England and Scotland.
Yet before there were Beauforts, there were Swynfords.
Katherine had already been a wife and mother before her relationship with John of Gaunt began. Her marriage to Sir Hugh Swynford is often treated merely as the opening chapter of the more famous story: Hugh serves abroad, Hugh dies, and Katherine’s relationship with Gaunt takes centre stage. His children can disappear almost as quickly.
They deserve rather more attention, not least because they reveal a side of Katherine that is easily lost beneath the story of royal love, scandal and dynasty.
Katherine Swynford before the Beauforts
Katherine de Roët married Sir Hugh Swynford, a Lincolnshire knight associated with the household of John of Gaunt. Precisely when they married remains uncertain, although Katherine was certainly known as Katherine Swynford by the mid-1360s.
The marriage brought her particularly close to Lincolnshire. The Swynfords held the manors of Kettlethorpe and Coleby, but they were not enormously wealthy landed magnates. Their estates had only comparatively recently come into Swynford hands, and surviving valuations suggest that the properties were not uniformly prosperous. Parts of the land were poor, buildings required repair, and Kettlethorpe itself was vulnerable to flooding.
This was the setting in which Katherine first became a wife and mother. It is also where we encounter a surprisingly difficult question: how many children did Katherine and Hugh actually have?
Modern family trees often give reassuringly precise answers, but the medieval evidence is less obliging. Two children can be identified with considerable confidence: Thomas Swynford and Blanche Swynford. There is also a strong case for a daughter named Margaret, who later became a nun at Barking Abbey, although her parentage is not explicitly stated in the surviving record. She therefore belongs in the category of probable rather than proven children.
That distinction matters. One of the recurring problems in Katherine’s story is that details repeated often enough can begin to look like established fact when the evidence is actually more uncertain.
Thomas Swynford
Thomas is the Swynford child about whom we know most. When Hugh Swynford died in 1371, the inquisition held after his death identified Thomas as his son and heir and described him as about four years old. That places his birth around 1367–68. Whatever later speculation arose about his parentage, the records surrounding Hugh’s death treated Thomas straightforwardly as Hugh Swynford’s legitimate heir.
Thomas grew up in circumstances that were anything but ordinary. He was the son of Katherine and Hugh Swynford, but his mother later became the acknowledged mistress of one of the most powerful men in Europe. His younger half-siblings were John of Gaunt’s children, while Gaunt’s legitimate son Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, became in effect Thomas’s stepbrother.
Such a family arrangement might easily have produced division. Instead, the evidence suggests that Thomas became firmly integrated into the Lancastrian world. By the early 1380s he had entered John of Gaunt’s retinue, and in 1390 he served with Henry Bolingbroke on his expedition to Prussia. He married Joan Crophill and later received an annuity from Richard II.
John of Gaunt continued to remember Katherine’s son. When the duke died in 1399, Thomas received a substantial bequest of 100 marks. That is worth noticing because it shows that Gaunt did not simply provide for the four children he had fathered with Katherine. Thomas Swynford, the son of Katherine’s first husband, remained inside his circle.
The Beauforts did not replace the Swynfords. They joined them.
Thomas and the death of Richard II
Thomas Swynford also acquired a darker place in history after Henry Bolingbroke returned to England in 1399, deposed Richard II and became Henry IV. Richard was eventually imprisoned at Pontefract Castle, where he died in early 1400.
Thomas has often been described as Richard’s gaoler and sometimes implicated directly in the manner of the deposed king’s death. Here, however, caution is necessary. The chronicler Adam of Usk refers to a Swynford in connection with Richard’s custody, but the identification is not as straightforward as later retellings sometimes suggest.
That does not remove Thomas from the political world that destroyed Richard II. He was unquestionably a Lancastrian supporter and subsequently prospered under Henry IV. What cannot safely be done is to move from that fact to the confident claim that Thomas personally caused Richard’s death.
This is another reminder that Katherine’s family accumulated stories in much the same way that she did.
Katherine the mother
One document from the end of Katherine’s life gives us a particularly valuable glimpse of her relationship with Thomas.
After becoming king, Henry IV continued to treat his stepmother generously. Among Katherine’s benefits was an annual allowance of four tuns of wine from the royal supply at Kingston upon Hull. On 12 April 1403, Katherine petitioned the king asking that two of those four tuns should instead be delivered to Thomas Swynford and his wife.
Katherine died less than a month later, on 10 May 1403.
We cannot know precisely why she made the request. Perhaps she was already ill and knew that her own household would no longer require the full allowance. Perhaps it was simply a practical redistribution within the family. Even so, the record is striking.
One of Katherine Swynford’s last recorded actions concerned her Swynford son, Thomas. At the end of a life so often described through her relationship with John of Gaunt and the extraordinary success of the Beauforts, she was still acting as a mother to the child of her first marriage.
For anyone interested in finding Katherine the woman behind Katherine the royal ancestress, it is a small but important piece of evidence.
Blanche Swynford
Thomas had at least one sister whose existence can also be securely connected with Katherine and Hugh. Her name was Blanche.
We know something particularly interesting about her because John of Gaunt was her godfather. When Gaunt later sought papal permission to marry Katherine, their existing spiritual relationship created a problem in canon law. By becoming godfather to a daughter born to Katherine by another man, Gaunt had acquired a form of spiritual kinship with Katherine.
That evidence is valuable because it confirms that Katherine and Hugh had a daughter for whom Gaunt stood godfather, and other surviving material allows her to be identified as Blanche.
The choice of name is suggestive. It is tempting to assume that she was named for Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s first wife, in whose household Katherine served. That is entirely plausible, although it remains an inference rather than something stated in a contemporary document.
In 1375 Gaunt also made provision involving the wardship of the young Robert Deyncourt, granted to Katherine in connection with her daughter Blanche. Wardships could be financially valuable, and the arrangement appears to have been intended to help secure Blanche’s future, possibly with marriage in mind.
After this, Blanche becomes much harder to trace.
What happened to Blanche?
The traditional conclusion has often been that Blanche died young, and that remains possible. There is, however, another intriguing possibility.
In 1381 a woman named Blanche married Sir Thomas Morrieux, one of Gaunt’s retainers, and received generous wedding gifts from the duke. Froissart describes this Blanche as an illegitimate daughter of John of Gaunt by a woman named Marie de St Hilaire.
The difficulty is that Froissart is not infallible, and there is no independent evidence that conclusively establishes this woman’s parentage. It has therefore been suggested that Blanche Morrieux might instead have been Blanche Swynford.
There are suggestive details. Gaunt arranged handsome gifts for Blanche Morrieux, while Morrieux himself received generous rewards from him. Katherine Swynford also appears in the same wider network of patronage. Most importantly, there is no surviving record in which Katherine’s daughter Blanche and Gaunt’s supposed daughter Blanche can clearly be shown to exist as two separate women.
None of this proves that they were the same person. It does, however, mean that the easy statement that Blanche Swynford “died young” should not be treated as established fact.
Sometimes leaving a question open is more historically honest than providing a tidy answer.
Margaret Swynford: Katherine’s forgotten daughter?
The most intriguing possibility concerns Margaret Swynford.
In 1377, at the beginning of Richard II’s reign, the Crown nominated a young woman of that name for entry into Barking Abbey. The record does not identify Margaret explicitly as the daughter of Hugh and Katherine Swynford, and that must be made clear. Nevertheless, there are reasons for thinking she may have been.
Her likely age would fit comfortably with a daughter born during the earlier years of Katherine’s marriage. There were also connections between Barking and Katherine’s wider family. An Elizabeth Chaucer was associated with the abbey, and John of Gaunt made a substantial payment connected with her admission. If Elizabeth belonged to the family of Katherine’s sister Philippa Chaucer, then two young women from the interconnected Swynford-Chaucer family may have entered the same prestigious religious community.
Margaret Swynford eventually became Abbess of Barking in 1419 and remained in office until her death in 1433. Other later connections between Barking and members of the Beaufort family make the identification still more attractive, although not conclusive.
I find the possibility persuasive, but persuasive is not the same as proven. For now, Margaret is best described as probably Katherine Swynford’s daughter.
If that identification is correct, Katherine’s first family becomes even more interesting. One daughter may have married into Gaunt’s affinity, another may have entered one of England’s most important female religious houses, while Thomas pursued the secular life of a Lancastrian knight.
One family, not two
Perhaps the most important thing the Swynford children reveal is that we should stop imagining Katherine’s life as a sequence of separate compartments: first Hugh, then John; first the Swynfords, then the Beauforts.
The surviving evidence suggests something more complicated and more human. Thomas remained close to the Lancastrian family. John of Gaunt patronised him. Henry IV rewarded him. The Beauforts continued to assist members of the Swynford family in the next generation. These were not two families divided neatly according to their fathers.
They behaved like one extended family.
That may tell us something important about Katherine herself. It would have been easy for the extraordinary circumstances of her later life to obscure the comparatively modest Lincolnshire marriage with which her adult life had begun. By 1396 the former wife of Hugh Swynford had become Duchess of Lancaster. Her Beaufort sons were moving rapidly into the highest ranks of church and state, while Joan Beaufort had married into the great Neville family.
Yet Katherine’s earlier life was not erased. Kettlethorpe remained part of her story, and Thomas remained her son. In April 1403, with only weeks of her life remaining, she was still making provision for his household.
For all the fascination of kings, dukes, scandal, legitimisation and royal descent, that modest administrative record may bring us closer to Katherine than many of the grander events associated with her name.
Before Katherine Swynford became the mother of a dynasty, she had already become a mother. The Swynford children should not be allowed to disappear beneath the Beaufort family tree.
